Prashant Kutade

System Analyst

John Deere Technologies

location_on India

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Prashant Kutade

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I am working as a Scrum Master for my Scrum Team in John Deere Technologies (JDTCI).

Working for the Intelligent Solutions Group where I am the part of delivering frugal solutions in Telematics area.

ISG adopted Agile since last 2 years and doing an outstanding job in adapting new practices. The teams in ISG are very excited in adopting the new challenges and delivering the products for John Deere customers and dealers.

How should be a Sprint Retrospective ?

schedule 4 years ago

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45 Mins

Experience Report

Beginner

Sprint Retrospective

Sprint Retrospective is a meeting that happens at the end of each Sprint that usually occurs after the Sprint Review. This practice involves the Scrum Master and the team members to discuss what went right and what went wrong in the practices adopted during the Sprint. Thus, it allows modify some practices to maximize the positive and avoid negative points. This meeting provides a moment for greater interaction among the members and allows the team to self evaluate and propose the necessary changes, thereby strengthening the sense of teamwork.

Like the other meetings in Agile, the Sprint Retrospective requires many adjustments. In the experience reported in one of the Sprint Retrospective in John Deere TCI(Pune, 2013), someproblems that were faced related with the presence of all members at the meeting and related with the tool support. The first trouble was to find a time when everyone could attend, since this meeting was initially scheduled one day after the Sprint Review. The solution was to hold the meeting after the Sprint Review and limit the maximum duration for two hours, so this is not tiring. The second difficulty is the need for multiple tools for holding the meeting, the techniques to be followed to drive the meeting and raise the positive and negative suggestions, as well as project management tool like Rally for presenting data from the project’s progress, such as the Product Burndown.

Despite the importance of the presence of all team members in the Scrum meetings, in some situations, for example, a project with many distributed teams, a remote meeting with all members becomes impractical which should be avoided. Thus, for those situations, this proposed approach suggested to do a Sprint Retrospective by team, and saving the information collected at each meeting. This information collected should be shared to all members, allowing them to analyze the improvements suggested by other teams.

One last modification is to hold a meeting among each Scrum Master, similar with Scrum of Scrums, to discuss the Sprint Retrospective done by each team, and with that, it is possible to align the dependency among them. This meeting may occur the day after the Sprint Retrospective of the teams, and it is crucial that each Scrum Master considers the points raised by other teams before the meeting between them, in order to optimize its duration.